Effect of action video games on the spatial distribution of visuospatial attention

Abstract

The authors investigated the effect of action gaming on the spatial distribution of attention. The authors used the flanker compatibility effect to separately assess center and peripheral attentional resources in gamers versus nongamers. Gamers exhibited an enhancement in attentional resources compared with nongamers, not only in the periphery but also in central vision. The authors then used a target localization task to unambiguously establish that gaming enhances the spatial distribution of visual attention over a wide field of view. Gamers were more accurate than nongamers at all eccentricities tested, and the advantage held even when a concurrent center task was added, ruling out a trade-off between central and peripheral attention. By establishing the causal role of gaming through training studies, the authors demonstrate that action gaming enhances visuospatial attention throughout the visual field.

Figure 1

Perceptual load stimuli. The participants’ task was to determine as quickly and accurately as possible which of two possible target shapes (square or diamond) appeared in one of the six circular frames. Task difficulty was manipulated by the addition of other shapes in the circular frames. Low loads correspond to displays with the target alone or with one other shape in the circular frame, whereas high loads correspond to displays with three or five shapes in addition to the target. The distractor shape is the shape that does not appear in one of the six circular frames. Participants were explicitly told to ignore the distractor shape, which could be either compatible (i.e., led to the same response as the target) or incompatible (i.e., led to the opposite response from the target). The distractor shapes could be presented either centrally, that is, appearing within the ring of circular frames, or peripherally, appearing outside of the ring.

Figure 2

Results of Experiment 1: Size of compatibility effect (RT incompatible minus RT compatible) as a function of eccentricity. As in previous work, there is a trend for greater compatibility effects to be present for center distractors. Of note, video-game players (VGPs) show compatibility effects for both center and peripheral distractors, suggesting that the changes in the VGP population are not specific to the visual periphery. RT = reaction time.

Figure 3

Experiment 2: Accuracy of target localization as a function of eccentricity for gamers (VGPs) and nongamers (NVGPs). VGPs localize a peripheral target far more accurately than NVGPs at each eccentricity (x-axis), both without (A) and with (B) distractors present.

Figure 4

Experiment 3: Accuracy of target localization as a function of eccentricity, training group, and test. The action-trained group showed a significantly greater improvement in localization accuracy than the control group following training at each eccentricity for all of the conditions other than the no-distractors/no-center-task condition, for which the result was nearly significant (p = .06).